The Washington Post, June 25, 2000, Sunday, BOOK WORLD; Pg. X03
HEADLINE: Biology, Destiny and Dissent
BYLINE: Michael Shermer

   Creationism, in some form, will probably be with us as long as Biblical
fundamentalists continue their misguided efforts to squeeze the square peg
of religion into the round hole of science. But the debate over whether
evolution happened was played out over a century ago; the evolution wars
today are over how evolution happened. Of course, outside of professionals
in the field, no one cares a whit about how cockroaches or coelacanths
evolved. The evolution wars are being fought over how one particular
species evolvedHomo sapiensand the social, political and ideological
implications of the competing theories.
   The evolution wars began in 1859 with the publication of Charles
Darwin's
Origin of Species. But they heated up in 1975 with the release of
entomologist
E.O. Wilson's Sociobiology and have not let up since, as evidenced by the
controversies generated by sociobiology's doppelgangerevolutionary
psychologyand its attempt to account for human behavior in terms of
evolutionary adaptations (for example, the recent attempt to explain rape
as an adaptive strategy by males who could not pass on their genes by
nonforceful sex). [See E.O. Wilson's "Writing Life" on pages 67.] The
modern evolution wars now have their chronicler in sociologist Ullica
Segerstrale, whose masterfully comprehensive Defenders of the Truth was 25
years in the making.
   At stake in this battle are nothing less than how human societies
should be
structured, the nature of human nature and, as Segerstrale notes, "the
soul of science." How an academic textbook by an entomologist could result
in one of the most rancorous debates in all of science is marvelously
explained in intricate detail, beginning with the reactions to Wilson by
his Harvard colleagues Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin. Their
Sociobiology Study Group, along with the politically charged Science for
the Peoplea group of Harvardbased academics, such as Gould and Lewontin,
for the diffusion of scientific knowledge to the general populationset the
stage for a nowfamous incident at the 1978 meeting of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science: Demonstrators chanted "Racist
Wilson, you can't hide, we charge you with genocide!", followed by someone
pouring a jug of icewater over his head and shouting "Wilson, you are all
wet!"
   Why, Wilson wondered two decades later in his autobiographical book
Naturalist, didn't Gould and Lewontin just come up to his office from
theirs one floor below in the same Harvard building to discuss their
concerns? Why attack him in the very public pages of the New York Review
of Books when this all could have been handled in private? The reason, as
Segerstrale so brilliantly shows, is that science is not the private and
always rational enterprise it is often made out to be. Why, Gould and
Lewontin could just as easily have asked, didn't Wilson come down one
floor to their offices to discuss with them in private his ideas about
applying principles of animal behavior to human societies?
   The answer is the same: If you want to get your theories out into the
marketplace of ideas, you cannot sequester them in your office. You've got
to make them public, and the more public the better. Hashing the debate
out in public gives you the forum you would never get in private.
   As Segerstrale argues, correctly I think, this is exactly what happened
in the sociobiology debate. Gould and Lewontin had a scientific agenda
that they wanted to air publiclythat adaptationist, genecentered arguments
in evolutionary theory can be carried too far, and that much in the
history of life can be explained by nonadaptive processes and a
multileveled analysis of genes, individuals and groups. What better way to
do it than to use Wilson as their foil?
   But who in the general public knows or cares about adaptations,
exaptations,
spandrels, contingencies and other esoterica of evolutionary biology? What
the public does understand quite well is Nazis, eugenics, racepurification
programs and other abuses of biology from the past century. Thus,
sociobiology's critics reasoned, the best strategy is to begin with its
ideological implicationsparticularly the racist overtones of genetic
determinismto capture an audience, then segue into the scientific
arguments about the problems with hyperadaptationism. Gould said as much
at a 1984 Harvard meeting that Segerstrale attended: "We opened up the
debate by taking a strong position. We took a definitive stand in order to
open up the debate to scientific criticism. Until there is some legitimacy
for expressing contrary opinions, scientists will shut up." From this (and
numerous interviews with all parties involved) Segerstrale concludes:
"What I take Gould to be saying here is that the controversy around
Wilson's Sociobiology was, in fact, a vehicle for the real scientific
controversy about adaptation! Far, then, from 'dragging politics into it,'
or being 'dishonest' as [Ernst] Mayr accused Gould and Lewontin of being,
their political involvement would have been instead a deliberate maneuver
to gain a later hearing for their fundamentally scientific argument about
adaptation. What Gould seems to have been saying here is that the
scientific controversy about adaptation could not have been started
without the political controversy about sociobiology."
   Before we accuse Gould and Lewontin of being overly Machiavellian in
their political machinations, however, Segerstrale points out that Wilson
was not an innocent victim in this debate. It seems unlikely that a
Harvard professor could write a book whose title defines a new science of
applying biology to human social behavior, in the middle of a decade that
was defined by its ideological emphasis on egalitarian politics and
cultural determinism, and not expect trouble. In fact, the central point
of Segerstrale's book is that all scientists have an agenda and the sooner
we recognize that fact and come clean with our own, the better will the
public be able to judge scientific theories.
   Certainly Gould and Lewontin went too far, as all social movements are
wont to do. When I first met Ed Wilson, I couldn't believe what a kind,
generous and softspoken man he isanything but what I had expected from
following the sociobiology debates. Then again, as Segerstrale
convincingly shows, it would appear that Wilson knew exactly what he was
doing all along. From Sociobiology to his latest book, Consilience, he has
brilliantly orchestrated a program of biologizing all of human behavior,
from mate selection and maternal love to war and religion. No wonder the
evolution wars have been so heated. Much is on the line, and if you don't
mind weeding through the sometimes overly detailed recounting of events
and lengthy quotes (professionals in the field will relish every word,
however), Defenders of the Truth will put you right in the heart of this
epic tale that continues unfolding before us, exactly threequarters of a
century after the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel's revolutionary research on
heredity.

   If there is an individual besides Darwin at the beginning and Wilson
now whom we can identify as the figurehead of the evolution wars, it is
Gregor Mendel, whose work was rediscovered nearly simultaneously in 1900
by Hugo De Vries, Karl Correns and Erich von Tschermak. And, like Darwin
and Wilson, by temperament Mendel was about as unlikely a revolutionary as
one can imagine. He truly was the "monk in the garden," as his biographer,
science writer Robin Marantz Henig, describes him in the title of her
engaging book. We have libraries filled with works by and about Darwin,
but we have almost nothing on Mendel, thus opening the door to science
mythmaking at its best, as Henig explains:
   "To some extent, Mendel's story is primarily the story of a gardener,
patiently tending his plants, collecting them, counting them, working out
his ratios, and calmly, clearly explaining an amazing findingthen waiting
for someone to understand what he was talking about. It is the story of a
gentle revolutionary who was born a generation too soon."
   Henig has done a remarkable job of fleshing out the myth with what few
facts there are, and as such that part of her book is a loving tribute to
a man we will sadly probably never know much about, either as a person or
a scientist. Thus, the question some have raised as to the possibility of
Mendel's fudging his data to make his famous 3:1 ratio come out clean is
most likely an unanswerable one, because all we have to go on is a couple
of letters written to a German botanist and a single 44page paper that
Mendel called a mere summary of his public lectures, written for clarity,
not historical accuracy.
   Therefore the action really begins in the second half of the book, long
after Mendel has died, when the evolution wars start heating up again over
whether traits are inherited in discrete units or whether they blend with
other traits into a new amalgam. Just as Gould and Lewontin were to use
Wilson to promote their own vision of nature (while both sides claimed
Darwin as their hero), so too did the two major characters in the Mendel
story, William Bateson and Hugo de Vries, use each other.
   The parallels are eerie. Just as Wilson coined "sociobiology" and Niles
Eldredge and Gould "punctuated equilibrium," Bateson created "zygote,"
"homozygote" and in 1905 "genetics" (from the Greek genetikos, meaning
"origin" or "fertile"). De Vries shortened Darwin's "pangenesis" to
"pangen," but in 1909 the Dutch plant physiologist Wilhelm Johannsen
bettered him with "gene," a concept he naively presupposed to be "free
from any hypotheses." Why the fight over terminology? Because language
matters, as Henig notes: "This universal language was the first step in
turning the emerging science of genetics into a coherent discipline."
   It is here that Mendel once again enters the picture. "Every new
science
needs a herosomeone on whose giant shoulders his disciples can standand
Mendel was an easy man to lionize." And just as today's debaters each
believe they are "defenders of the truth," Henig shows how even when the
wars began a century ago, "Both sides were playing for the highest stakes:
the right to claim a truthful insight into the workings of the natural
world. What they uncovered eventually became the foundation of a science
that has taken us to the very brink of human possibilities."
   What the future holds for the evolution wars may be glimpsed in the
next generation's writings, an intriguing representative sample of which
can be found in paleoanthropologist Jeffrey McKee's The Riddled Chain. The
subtitle alone, "Chance, Coincidence, and Chaos in Human Evolution," tells
us that this is not a strictly genefocused, adaptationist analysis. The
alliterative reference is to influences outside the traditional forces of
study that have shaped the course of evolution, and once again the topic
is our favorite species.
   McKee cleverly draws the reader into theoretical debates about human
evolution through personal stories of his field work in South Africa. But
he is not just interested in the search for our origin, which is now
reasonably well fleshed out in a very bushy tree of life. There is no
linear chain in "the ascent of man" that can be cleanly drawn from Lucy to
us. Instead, as McKee demonstrates through a convergence of evidence
ranging from fossils to computer simulations, "Natural selection is
severely limited both in its power to promote useful genes and in its
freedom to tinker with morphology. Human bodies are not particularly well
adapted in many respects, revealing the chance origins of nature's
'designs.' Chance and chaos, as much as the ever vigilant selective
process, made us what we are."
   To strict adaptationists like Richard Dawkins and E.O. Wilson, these
are fighting words. If natural selection is not the be all and end all of
evolution, then what is? Autocatalysis, McKee argues in the book's most
daring chapter. "Autocatalytic evolution simply means this: evolution is
caused (catalyzed) by itself (auto). It is selfpropelled by feedback
loops. If this means that most evolutionary change is catalyzed or caused
by the inherent nature of a species, then the grand theories of
environmental forcing fall away. Evolution would proceed with or without
changes in climate or in the plant and animal community with which a
species interacts. Evolution is the cause of evolution, and it continues
by its chaotic devices."
   Autocatalysis is a superior model for explaining the complexities of
life because, as biologists have discovered in recent decades
(particularly with the rise of the science of ecology), simple linear
models fail to account for complex biological systems. The same has to be
true for the history of life. It certainly is in human cultural history,
which is riddled with autocatalytic feedback loops and, in fact, forms the
core of Jared Diamond's revolutionary book Guns, Germs, and Steel. McKee
believes that he's on to something here that could very well start yet
another evolution war: "The theory of autocatalytic evolution is painfully
simple, horribly mundane, and probably correct." Is it? The evidence is
good, but it is too soon to tell, so as in the debate over Wilson's
sociobiology and Mendel's genetics, the battle for science will be
determined in both the private and public spheres of influence.

   Michael Shermer is the publisher of Skeptic magazine (www.skeptic.com)
and the author of "Why People Believe Weird Things." His latest book is
"How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science."

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